Album of Foster Island BioBlitz Field Trip

Selected photos by Rod
Crawford from the spider collecting portion of the Arboretum BioBlitz on 21 May 2010, in the Foster Island section of the University of Washington's Washington Park Arboretum. Rather than explore new territory as I'd done at recent BioBlitz events in Pierce County, this one (intended to create a biological baseline prior to expansion of the freeway bridge crossing the island), involved revisiting a place close to home, where many spider species were collected in the 1960s and 1970s. There had been some changes, the biggest of them an expanded presence of introduced spider species, now making up 40% of the collected fauna. But I also collected some natives not found here before, most notably Dictyna annulipes, found here for the 3rd time in western Washington, but common at all sites sampled; and a Philodromus crab spider that is either new, or ballooned all the way from east of the Cascades!